Modern enterprise network infrastructures continue to grow in size and complexity. As enterprises extend data, voice, and video communications and applications, to a broader set of users, the volume and pace of electronic information flow is growing and networks are more critical than ever. Users expect reliable and predictable network performance, even as new applications are added to the network infrastructure. Information technology (IT) professionals are tasked with implementing and managing these increasingly complex network infrastructures and ensuring that applications and services run well across a wide range of technologies that inherently rely on the network.
As the job of resolving network security, connectivity and performance issues is becoming more complex and more difficult, IT departments continue to strive to reduce costs, increase operational efficiencies and roll out new applications and services to support the business. Services must be delivered within acceptable levels of performance for all users.
Security solutions are often distributed and deployed in larger numbers across an entire enterprise network, from wired to wireless to remote access. Policy management to control to grant, limit, or prevent network access in alignment with appropriate business policy or security compliance requirements and guidelines presents an ongoing challenge.
Monitoring and troubleshooting all the components that make up the enterprise network infrastructure has become even more of a challenge. While traditional network management and monitoring approaches may collect large volumes of data, they can often leave gaps in coverage and involve a great deal of effort to manually configure for a constantly changing set of devices and services. Maintaining network security and operational efficiency in today's distributed enterprise networks demands new solutions to prevent or solve issues and to minimize any impact on the business.